Saturday, September 05, 2009

Mark's points on the George Will Fray    [Andy McCarthy]

I appreciate the Great One’s thoughtful article in response to my column. Besides its graciousness, brother Mark hits all the important issues and I’m pleased that we’re largely in agreement — more even than his article suggests.

 

Mark is at pains to point out that democracy promotion was not the reason we went to Iraq. That has been my contention all along. I’ve respectfully disagreed with the argument, most forcefully made by the great Norman Podhoretz, that democratization was a principal aim of the war in Iraq. I freely concede — Norman’s meticulous accounting of this makes it impossible not to — that the Bush administration’s rhetoric was threaded from the start with democratization ambitions. But I don’t believe the freedom agenda was a casus belli. The American people would never go to war for such a reason.

 

We went to war because the Iraqi regime was (a) a terror facilitator that (b) was in gross violation of the terms that ended the Gulf War and (c) was credibly thought have a thriving WMD program (d) the arsenal of which it might share with its terrorist allies — an unacceptable risk after 9/11. I supported the war on that basis. My objection was the later shift in priorities to nation-building and democracy promotion — especially given that our enemies in and out of Iraq had not (and still have not) been defeated.

 

Mark is also right in opposing an immovable position against nation-building and democracy promotion. I don’t hold such a position. As he ably relates, we can do and have done these things. The proper strategy does indeed depend on our best interests under the circumstances. 

 

My point is that it is not worthwhile, and is likely counterproductive, to try to build democracies in a different civilization that opposes our core principles. On this score, Mark cites the exception that proves the rule. Ataturk, who knew a hell of a lot more about Islam than we do, was determined to have Turkey westernize and knew that, to pull that off, Islam had to be suppressed — in the classroom, the institutions, the government, and the public square. Indeed, among his first moves was formally to shut down the caliphate, even though it had long ceased to exist as anything other than a symbolic office. He realized that modernizing was so daunting a challenge that he could leave no doubt about his determination to purge Islam from politics and confine it to the spiritual realm (even though Islam is no longer Islam that way). The interesting thing is that Turkey turns out to be, irrevocably, part of the Islamic civilization: 80 years after Ataturk’s secularization, Islamism is now resurgent — Turkey is feinting West as it turns East.

 

Democracy promotion is counterproductive because it feeds the illusion that the two civilizations can assimilate and be harmonized. They can’t. We’re hell-bent to prove the impossible, so we set out to spread democracy and end up capitulating to sharia-lite. Islamism is under no such illusion. When it spreads, it does so without such compromises — it expects the West to accommodate Muslim law and culture, not the other way around. As a result, Western values are eroding and our sovereignty is under siege — from within by the Muslim Brotherhood’s voluntary apartheid strategy (the European landscape is dotted with Islamic enclaves where sharia is the law and non-Muslims, including the police, dare not tread); and from without by the Islamist influence over the U.N. and the international human rights movement.

 

To the extent I have some differences with Mark, they involve Afghanistan. The Taliban was complicit in 9/11 only in the general sense that any government that gave material support to al-Qaeda knew it was assisting a network that existed to wage violent jihad against America and the West. The Taliban gave al-Qaeda safe-haven, Iraq collaborated on weapons development, Iran provided training and transportation assistance, but it’s never been proved that any of these regimes had foreknowledge of the 9/11 plot. (I'm not saying they didn't; I'm saying if they did it has never been proved.) If Mark’s point is that, having provided an operations-base to al-Qaeda, the Taliban should be seen as culpable and a threat to the United States, I agree.

 

But we are obviously not waging the kind of war Mark and I have called for — a war in which we actually follow the Bush Doctrine, hunt down al Qaeda wherever it is, and deal with all the regimes that abet it. On that score, Mark argues that President Bush was clear on dealing with regimes that gave safe-harbor to al-Qaeda. I’d say the president was rhetorically clear; the administration's actions did not match the rhetoric. Iran gave safe-harbor and other assistance to al Qaeda and we did worse than nothing — we told the mullahs everything would be peachy if they would at least pretend (i.e., unverifiably commit) to shut down their nuclear program. Not only have they spurned that demand; they interpreted the fecklessness of it as a failure of will, which emboldened them to continue orchestrating terror attacks that continue to this day against our troops in the region.

 

The Bush doctrine is a tough program, but it’s the only way to defeat Islamist terrorism against the West. If the will is not there to implement it, we have to assess what resources we are willing to expend and how they should be allocated to deal with the full threat, not just the threat in Afghanistan. I agree that whatever we do in Afghanistan has to be meaningful, but maintaining force levels or ratcheting up in Afghanistan would be counterproductive if that commitment is used — justifiably or not — to argue that we don’t have the resources to deal with Iran and other al-Qaeda strongholds. I also believe any coherent strategy has to minimize our interactions with the Muslim world; if we are not going to defend ourselves adequately, it only makes sense to reduce the contacts that inevitably cause conflict. 

09/05 02:41 PMShare